The present disclosure is an invention disclosure relating to a method of indicating focus in an environment comprising scrollable areas in nested arrangement, a system for indicating focus as well as a corresponding computer program product.
Graphical user interfaces employ scrollable areas that allow a larger amount of information to be presented than may be presented at one time within the viewable area. One (child) scrollable area may be nested within another (parent) scrollable area. Indeed, one (child) scrollable area may be nested within another (parent) scrollable area that is nested within another (grandparent) scrollable area, etc. Moreover, two or more (sibling) scrollable areas may be nested within another (parent) scrollable area, where the two or more (sibling) scrollable areas are in non-nested relationship. In other words, the scrollable areas may be nested in a hierarchical fashion that may include parent-child (also called “vertical”) relationships as well as sibling (also called “horizontal”) relationships.
In such graphical user interfaces, only one of the scrollable areas is “in focus” at a given time. In other words, a scrolling action only acts upon one of the scrolling areas at a time. The active scrolling area is designated as being “in focus” since that scrolling area is the “focus” of the user's attention.